Gay Marriage Prompts Call for Clergy to Shun Civil Ceremonies

Image

Holly Taylor Coolman, a theologian, called marriage a “communally discerned” phenomenon.CreditJoel Hawksley for The New York Times

By Mark Oppenheimer

Jan. 2, 2015

If you read wedding announcements, you may have noticed that members of the clergy do not matter as much as they used to. More and more people are married by judges, or justices of the peace, or friends who get officiating privileges from the state. Others use what we might call “clergy lite,” ordained by online services like the Universal Life Church, which has but two tenets — “To promote freedom of religion” and “To do that which is right” — and requires only your name and email address and a promise that you are “over the age of 13.”

Full disclosure: I am a Universal Life minister, and have performed one wedding. But millions of Americans are still married by traditional ministers, priests, rabbis and other clergy members. They are generally granted a special role in weddings, as officers of the state. They can sign your marriage license, and when they do, it all becomes official. It is an obvious commingling of church and state, one to which most Americans have been amenable. Letting a minister sign the license recognizes that most people want their marriage ceremony to be both sacramental and civil.

But as same-sex marriage becomes the law in more states — at last count, 35 states, plus the District of Columbia — some clergy members who are opposed to same-sex marriage are discovering that being officers of the state puts them in an awkward position. They are signing marriage licenses that get filed with a state government whose laws, they believe, are undermining traditional notions of marriage. And so a few of them have said, in effect, “No more.”

In its December issue, the conservative Christian magazine First Things published “The Marriage Pledge,” by Christopher Seitz and Ephraim Radner, both Episcopal priests and theologians who teach at Wycliffe College in Toronto. The pledge commits clergy members not to sign “government-provided marriage certificates.” Its online version has attracted 370 signers.

“In many jurisdictions,” Dr. Seitz and Dr. Radner write, “including many of the United States, civil authorities have adopted a definition of marriage that explicitly rejects the age-old requirement of male-female pairing.” Therefore, to continue “with church practices that intertwine government marriage with Christian marriage will implicate the church in a false definition of marriage.”

The authors promise to “ask couples to seek civil marriage separately from their church-related vows and blessings.” And they “will preside only at those weddings that seek to establish a Christian marriage in accord with the principles articulated and lived out from the beginning of the church’s life.” In practice, they ask couples to be married in Christian rites with ministers or priests, then to have second services, with judges or justices of the peace, who will sign their state licenses.

R. R. Reno, a Catholic ethicist who edits First Things, said that he and fellow traditionalists had been mulling over such a statement for a while.

“It’s an idea that has been tossed around in our circles for, gosh, at least the last five years,” said Dr. Reno, whose “circles” include the highly intellectual, mostly Catholic roster of First Things contributors. He said that in 2010, when First Things held a private symposium about the future of marriage for “maybe 20 or 25” theologians, the Duke theologian Paul J. Griffiths suggested separating civil from religious marriage. Most in attendance were against the move.

“But in the last year,” Dr. Reno said, “I could tell that people’s sentiments had shifted pretty strongly, and people who had spoken against this idea were thinking maybe it’s the right thing to do.”

It is a radical step, of course, one that abdicates a major privilege of the clergy. And there have been many dissenters, who view the pledge as a retreat in a culture war that is far from over. At MereOrthodoxy.com, one writer called the pledge “a posture that attempts to look courageous and prophetic but that is actually a timid, meek act of surrender.” In a web column, the radio host John Stonestreet wrote that “by backing out of the civil marriage business,” Christians would “risk perpetuating that illusion that marriage is something the government defines instead of something it recognizes.”

The pledge has exposed fault lines in the conservative Christian world. First, it raises the quarrel between those who would engage with culture and those who would separate from it. Second, there is the slightly different question of the church’s relationship not to culture, but to the government. (In his MereOrthodoxy.com post, Jake Meador neatly summarizes that conflict as one between two famous English Christians, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.)

And then there are the differences between Catholics, who are embedded in a robust hierarchy and have little personal autonomy in their faith, and Protestants, whose worshipers, and clergy members, typically have more latitude in interpreting what theology requires of them, and are thus freer to take radical personal stands.

“It’s not a decision Catholic priests are free to decide,” said Holly Taylor Coolman, a theologian at Providence College. “In the Catholic tradition, marriage is a communally discerned and practiced phenomenon. When priests are functioning as priests, there is much more at stake than their individual consciences.”

Dr. Coolman added that Catholic tradition recognizes areas besides marriage in which an act of the state ineluctably coincides with a religious act. As an example, she said that she was an adoptive parent.

“I became a parent through a legal process,” Dr. Coolman said. “But as somebody functioning in the Christian tradition, that is exactly the moment I took up what I understood to be the Christian vocation of parenthood.” In other words, the state’s adoption papers effected what for her was a Christian act, becoming a parent.

Chad Pecknold, who teaches at the Catholic University of America, suggested that signing the pledge could actually represent a form of pastoral malpractice, by absenting the minister or priest from a congregant’s major life decision.

“The pledge actually shifts any burden of conscience from ordained ministers to their flock,” Dr. Pecknold said. “It’s a kind of shocking vocational failure, to recommend that pastors shouldn’t sign these things,” he said, referring to marriage licenses.

“Their flock is going to have to sign,” he continued, “unless they want to give up the legal benefits of marriage.”

Dr. Seitz, one of the pledge’s authors, said that as an academic he does not “do the kind of weddings on a regular basis as someone whose full-time job” is in the clergy. And many of those who have signed his pledge appear to be laypeople, or women in traditions in which women do not perform weddings. Like them, he is mostly an observer, and one of his observations is that we are in “a funny time.”

If marriage moves toward becoming just “a contract between two people, the state can take care of that,” Dr. Seitz said. “And it makes a lot of sense — property, custody of children.” But he believes that marriage needs more, and that the state may be weakening, rather than enhancing, the customs and mores that uphold the institution.

Dr. Radner, the pledge’s other author, is on sabbatical in France, which has long separated religious marriage from civil marriage. Seeing the separation up close has only made him more of a fan.

“Just living here made me realize that the church can function rather well,” he said, “and also avoid some of the conflict that we seem to get all embroiled in in the U.S. over sexuality matters, by being somewhat disentangled, practically, from the civil marriage system.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Gay Marriage Prompts Call for Clergy to Shun Civil Ceremonies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe